Any discussion of the prior art throughout the specification should in no way be considered as an admission that such prior art is widely known or forms part of common general knowledge in the field.
It is known to use a large number of access control devices in an access control environment. Before each individual access control device is able to function as part of the access control environment, those individual devices need to be commissioned.
Commissioning is a process whereby an individual access control device is provided with data indicative of:                The context of the individual device within the larger system. For example, an identifier that is unique with respect to other devices in the system, and/or network information such as an IP address in the case of an IP enabled access control device.        Other information that allows the device to operate in an access control environment, such as electronic security keys and other authentication information.        
There are two main approaches for commissioning access control devices. The first approach relies on the access control devices being connected to a common network. An auto-discovery process is conducted over this network to discover the individual devices, assign unique identifiers, and transmit other commissioning information. This approach is often difficult to implement, particularly where network security constraints affect the ability to conduct an auto-discovery process (which typically necessitates broadcast messaging). There are additional complications where there is no DHCP server available, and practical difficulties in matching electronically discovered devices to physically observable devices. The second approach is to individually serially connect each access control device to a terminal, such as a laptop computer, and manually transmit the commissioning information from the terminal to the device. It will be appreciated that this is a time-consuming process, and impractical where there are a large number of access control devices. Additionally, the process is error prone, and there is a risk that non-unique identifiers could be assigned.
It follows that there is a need in the art for improved systems and methods for commissioning access control devices.